Rocket Knight Adventures: One of the Best Games Ever Made

You know, much is said about cinematic games that tell epic, engrossing stories. This is usually codeword for games that don't offer much aside from gameplay ripped from 2007 or so, and a story where anyone who has seen a movie or read a book before the 2000s can guess every single thing that will happen. Most who champion such games don't say much about the gameplay, or what makes it stand out from the rest.

What isn't appreciated much is how video games stories, and their appeal, used to be shown through their gameplay. Even simple platformers, the most common genre at the time, were capable of doing this. This might have been back when pulp storytelling was synonymous with everything from comic books to simple platformers, but it was a formula that always worked. It still works today!

Adventure stories are universal--they don't need to be designed after modern big budget movies to work. And for a long time they didn't.

Take the cult classic game Rocket Knight Adventures. Made by Konami during their golden age of the 1990s, this was one of their few creations created exclusively for the Sega Genesis. At the time of the console wars, Sega and Nintendo were doing just about anything to get a leg up on the other, and that included gathering exclusives. One such sadly overlooked gem from this time period is the game we are talking about today. The title you see above is completely accurate: this is an adventure unlike any you'll play. Especially unlike any you'll come across today.

You see, Konami got the director of the excellent Contra III: The Alien Wars and Contra: Hard Corps to create a brand new platformer mascot in the early '90s/ This was during the surge that was brought on when Sonic the Hedgehog took off and everyone was making their own mascot. Everyone was putting out a platformer, mostly to try and get in on the success Sega was enjoying. This led to a golden age of the genre that many fans of such games still go back to today, one of fertile releases that remain as good today as they did back then. The era was that good for the genre that it still reverberates today.

Konami's Rocket Knight Adventures is one of the peaks of this era, and you will find few people who disagree with this assessment. For good reason!

Made by me

So what exactly is it that makes the game so good? The thing to start with would be the aspect that makes all classic games what they are: the gameplay. This is the most important aspect of any game, and the gameplay here is as good as it gets for platformers.

It does everything it is supposed to do. Rocket Knight Adventures is a platformer, which means the main goal of the game is to traverse from one side of the screen to the other. This sounds a lot simpler than it is, as anyone who has ever played a platformer can attest. Where it differs from standard genre fare is in the title. You play as a rocket knight. That sounds as cool as it is to play. You can slash and boost across the screen with a charge jump, just as you'd figure. Being a rocket knight means you have a sword and a rocket pack which form the core of the gameplay. Everything after that from the design to the aesthetic all flows from this base concept.

This is one of the things that makes video games so different from other mediums: the gameplay system fed through the controller dictates everything else that forms around it. Your gameplay is centered on a sword and a rocket pack and this effects the level design, the story, the character designs, the art direction, and even the catchy music. The whole project hinges on the fact that you are playing as a rocket knight and the game is built to enhance and perfect the feeling that you are in fact one of these fantastical soldiers of good.

Should you look back at any classic video game from the golden age of the 1980s and 90s you will see they all follow this template to success. This has gotten lost over the years with recycled gameplay taking a backseat to whatever story the story team wants to tell, but it is the most important factor of good game design. Video games are about allowing you to play a role, and the gameplay enhances that feeling to complete the experience. 

This is the reason Nintendo has managed to retain so much popularity over the years. They are simply the only big company left who remembers this formerly obvious fact, and they profit from it.

Take the original Super Mario Bros. Did you know that the coins are placed how they are to subtly influence the player and guide them to make jumps so they learn how to play and even make tricky obstacles easier to avoid? All one has to do is pay attention, and the game doesn't even have to walk you through it. This was something Hideaki Kamiya emulated with his own hit back in the day, Viewtiful Joe. He claimed it was vital advice for design, and it is one he still uses to this day. You don't need tutorials if you can teach the player through the elements they were already given how to succeed. you teach through the gameplay the player is meant to master. This was so standard back in the day that everyone understood it internally.

Other companies did it, too.

In DOOM, you are a lone space marine fighting off a demonic invasion on mars. The level design, weapons, enemy patterns, and even music all work to build this atmosphere of action through desperation that permeates the game.  Even when you are good at the game and think you are Rambo, it doesn't take much to screw up and become just another corpse. The horror atmosphere never really disappears, even when you master the game. The horror experience always comes first.

In Thief, you play as the titular thief. Stealing, sneaking, and espionage, are all core elements of the gameplay. Without them the game wouldn't be what it is. The team wanted to make a game entirely about being a thief, which meant the gameplay had to nail all of that perfectly for it to work. The developers put everything to work to match the gameplay they had built. The rest of the production from the aesthetic to the story all take a backseat to the fact that the gameplay centering on being a thief needed to come first. As a result, is one of the best at what it does. Every element falls in line where it should be.

To bring it back around, Rocket Knight Adventures is exactly like the above examples. In fact, it is one of the best platformers of all time because it does all this with a wild idea for platforming and makes it feel 100% normal and natural at the same time. That isn't easy to do, but like all the best art and entertainment, the more well crafted something is the easier it looks to create. Rocket Knight Adventures feels effortless, when it certainly was not.

And there is our hero.

In RKA, you play as Sparkster, a possum knight who uses his rocket pack to fly about the land and bring justice where it need be brought out. You are a white hat hero who is celebrated as something of a legend. The rocket knight is the best of the best, after all. At the start of the game, the kingdom is under attack by the steam-powered pigs who attack and kidnap the princess. Does this feel like a job for a rocket knight? Boy howdy is it!

The entire first level deals with you fighting through the attacking pig army and flying towards the castle to put a stop to this oncoming assault. You then find out a rival knight has betrayed your kingdom and has taken the princess prisoner for the villains. Now you must do your duty and put things right again. Show them what the rocket knight is made of.

And that is what you spend the game doing. Who else could get through the madness to come unless they were the best of the best?

Each level in the game follows Sparkster's journey across the land towards the enemy empire, filling the moments with tough as nails platforming that will test your skills and enemies that are vicious enough to wish you had a rocket sword as well. This journey is not going to be easy.

While the gameplay is centered around jumping and slashing, the developers made sure to use every part of the animal, as the saying goes. You are a possum, so you can hang from objects with your tail. Your sword can be charged to do a spin attack or a rocket lunge, and yet it is more powerful the closer you are to your enemy which turns combat into a risk/reward system. Your rocket pack allows you to ricochet off walls which allows for accessing secrets in strange places as well as shortcuts, should you know what you are doing. In Rocket Knight Adventures, mobility is your best friend. What else does one expect from an elite rocket knight?

Even the console system itself is used to its utmost limit. You have mode-7 style moving and twisting sprites (even though the system isn't incapable of mode-7, Konami went all out on presentation) in regards to the scrolling and the bosses. Levels use wave reflection, darkness, rushing air, and every single trick available to make you need to use both your head and your platforming skills to traverse the insanity preventing you from completing your noble quest. You will be pushed to your skill limit in this one.

This is because Rocket Knight Adventures is an unapologetically hard game. Just like most of the video games made at the time, this one is going to put you through the grinder and make you earn your ending screen.

But the developers also knew that different people come to the genre for different things. As a result, it has multiple difficulty levels, including a super hard one-hit mode that comes straight from the people that make the Contra games. Konami was known for challenge. This one is most definitely no exception to the rule.

One of the issues with platformers these days is that they are simply too easy. Though there is a reason for this, mostly due to how the genre was treated post-1995.

With the advent of the 3D game consoles the platformer was shuffled off to handhelds and were eventually locked out of the home systems until the creation of downloadable games. They essentially went MIA for over a decade. Even then when they came back they were treated as eccentric and for niche audiences, never given the polish and focus they once had.

It took until New Super Mario Bros. Wii to come out on the Nintendo Wii to give the genre its place back in the spotlight. And even then, the game isn't that hard for anyone who knows the genre well. The issue is that for many they are so out of the loop on platformers that they consider games like these to be too hard today. This is what happens when the industry diverted from its original aims. Now arcade gaming is considered niche instead of the standard so arcade genres tend to not be as focused on challenge as they once were.

This shift in difficulty happened because the mainstream audience is essentially out of practice when it comes to arcade gameplay. So coming back to a game like Rocket Knight Adventures might be asking too much for most gamers these days. But for those used to it, RKA is arcade gaming perfection back when that was the expectation for good games. Perhaps it will be again. One can only hope.

Masterful level design, expertly balanced difficulty, striking art design, contribute to this greatly. As do the controls that take advantage of every part of the controllers, the player's reaction-time and expectations, and the many moves you can perform. Then there is the length that manages to be long enough without wearing out its welcome or short enough to feel unsatisfying. Oh yeah, and you also get to have a giant mecha fight at one point.

This is what helps make Rocket Knight Adventures one of the best games ever made. Platformer or not, it's close to perfect.

Unfortunately, the game was also more or less completely passed over back in the day. Perhaps it was due to too much competition at the time or just luck of the draw, but Rocket Knight Adventures didn't do very well at all. Most people who talk about it today discovered it via word of mouth--they didn't play it at the time. RKA simply never achieved the success it deserved.

And this thud of a performance affected the series going forward. After the original bombed, Konami pumped out two more sequels, one for the SNES and one for the Genesis. They were both called Sparkster, named after our protagonist, and yet both were completely different games. 

The Genesis sequel (subtitled Rocket Knight Adventures 2) is more twitchy and fast paced with more labyrinthine level design than the more arcadey original. The SNES sequel (which originally started as a port of the original game) is a good deal closer to the original, though the music, outside of the masterful stage 1 theme, is dull and the controls are more cumbersome than the first game was. Despite their differences with the original as well as each other, both do feel like sequels to the first one. But not the sort of sequel you'd hope for.

On top of this, neither were given close to the budget or attention the original did and as a result they aren't quite up to the standard of Rocket Knight Adventures is. They are fine enough games, but it is clear neither was given as much attention or polish that first one did. The controls and focus changed a bit with how the rocket pack works and even how basic attacks are delivered, both of which change the pitch perfect tactile feel of the first game. They were essentially overhauled from the original. Whether, again, this is because of perceived faults in the original because it didn't achieve success or not is unclear. Regardless, they aren't quite the sequels one hopes for from a follow-up to a classic like Rocket Knight Adventures.

It doesn't take a big brain to realize that if that classic first game didn't light the world on fire than these sequels wouldn't either, and they didn't. coming out in a crowded market and not reaching on par with the first game prevented them from gaining ground. The series was over before it really started. It's a shame, but that's just how it goes.

There was an attempt at a revival game over a decade ago, but as can be gleamed by the fact that it has been over ten years since its release, it didn't exactly revive the franchise or light the world on fire. It was a game that was full of ideas but sorely lacking in execution--a platformer made by developers who don't understand platformers or arcade design on a fundamental level. As such, it is merely average, and not really worth going into compared to the other games. Not as if you could play it these days if you wanted to anyway.

And that was pretty much it for Sparkster.

But that doesn't change the fact that Rocket Knight Adventures is one of a kind, and still well worth playing today. Even if Konami has all but forgotten about this one or wants bury it for whatever reason, RKA is still one of the best games on the already great Sega Genesis.

And that makes it one of the best games of all time.

So check it out today before used prices get too insane. This is a game that deserves to be rediscovered and played, given the attention it deserves. There isn't much like it out there, and there probably never will be again. But that is what makes this one so unique.

Who doesn't want to be a flying knight? I can't imagine. This is the sort of things video games were made to portray. Fighting for honor, princesses, and taking on rivals. Imagination run wild!

It doesn't get any better than this.

Adventures into the world of nightmares!